Wednesday, July 9, 2008

This is random, but important. When moving into an apartment, TAKE PICTURES OF EVERYTHING and upload them to Flickr/Snapfish/MySpace or whatever. Document the state of the room/apartment before you move in, and then upload those to some 3rd party site so you can prove the photos came from before you moved in. Trust me, even if you move into your best friend's attic, take the damn pictures.

Monday, July 7, 2008

In Yahoo fantasy baseball, managers (people playing the game) get to choose MLB players from the player pool for their teams. The player pool normally consists of everyone who is on an active MLB roster or was on a roster last year and has not formally declared retirement. The Yahoo team also has several minor league players added, usually the interesting ones (e.g. Evan Longoria). However, they do leave some notable minor leaguers out (e.g. Jay Bruce). This leads to interesting situations when those left-out players are called up to the bigs.

Having the #1 waiver priority is a huge advantage. It means that you get first dibs on the hot new rookies recently promoted to the bigs who were excluded from the player pool. You can snag that essentially free player, be it Clayton Kershaw or Jay Bruce, hitting or pitching, whatever you need. These excluded players really make the #1 waiver pick much more valuable than it should be.

In one of my leagues, Evan Longoria was drafted with the 180th pick (out of 400 players taken). But Jay Bruce, Johnny Cueto, Edison Volquez, Matt LaPorta, and other excluded players were undraftable, leading managers to draft such waiver trash as Jacque Jones, Luis Gonzalez, Lee Gardner, and Ronnie Belliard.

Players who want to take a risk and hold on to MiLB stars can only hope those stars are in the select few added by Yahoo's sports staff to the player pool. Waiver priority is designed to decide who to allow to pick up dropped players. Instead, it can be used as a tool to drastically improve a manager's team midseason.

Yahoo really needs to add all MiLB players in any team's 40-man roster to the player pool. There, that'smy piece. I'm done.

Tuesday, July 1, 2008

I plan to post a thorough review of everything that happened on my wedding day, because A) it was mostly awesome and B) I don't like having to tell the story 8000 times. But there was one part that totally sucked: the limo.

During our booking process, we discussed various Excursion/SUV limos with the limo company and the owner, Brendan. When we visited Brendan to sign the deal, he showed us two Excursion limos, and pointed out one of them that likely would be the one we'd get if we booked that day. We booked the Excursion limo that night with Brendan and handed him a hard copy of our itinerary.

First of all, the limo driver showed up in a 14-passenger Town Car limo instead of the 18-passenger Excursion limo we had ordered. We spoke with the owner on the phone and he insisted we ordered the smaller limo. He asked me to check my receipt, which I could not find, and that the receipt clearly said 14 passengers. While I haven't been able to find my copy of the receipt, we spoke exclusively with Brendan about the Excursion limo. Brendan only ever showed us Excursion limos. The only place 14 passengers was mentioned was when we asked him if 14 people would fit in the Excursion limo. Brendan even admitted on the phone on June 14th that the limo he sent us would not fit 14 people. We had to make immediate plans for groomsmen to drive their own cars instead of being in the limo.

Then, the driver was unable to turn on the electricity in the cabin for the first 15 minutes of the trip. This meant no radio and no air conditioning, a big deal on a hot June day. She did not have a copy of the itinerary that we sent in via email and by hard copy when we signed. We gave her the addresses and told her the time and schedule. After she dropped off the men at the church, she left the church to get lunch for herself without telling anyone. By the time she returned and we sent her to the hotel to pick up the bride, the wedding was delayed by 30 minutes. Our guests had to wait 30 minutes for us in the church, and we lost 30 minutes of the 5 hours we had booked for the reception.

On top of it all, Brendan and the driver were rude through the whole process. The driver acted like she was doing us a favor driving us around, and Brendan didn't make any attempt to apologize or even be nice to myself and my best man.

I am in the process of discussing this with the limo company, so I don't want to mention their name yet. We'll see how they respond to my query.

About Me

Currently employed to do .NET development, but I am comfortable in pretty much any language (not that I know them all, but most are pretty cool).

Husband for 6 years now, father of two daughters (see pics and videos to see how cute they are!).

Gamer for life; started on the Commodore 64 with Q-Bert, now playing mostly FPS titles. Really, just anything that is cool and fun.

Started a slow-pitch softball team a few years ago, nominated myself as the pitcher. I'm a decent hitter, but pretty solid pitcher (slow-pitch softball pitching is all about preventing walks, as there's not much you can do to prevent them from hitting the ball hard). Haven't played much since Mia was born, but I still have the itch!

Been a homeowner for 7 years now. It is both better and worse than I imagined it. More work than I imagined, but also feels better.